I've only really talked to Damon about this game and we basically disagree on just about everything about it so I figured I'd see what other people that are playing it might think.

The following is my opinion and take it with a grain of salt, I only watched til about chapter 5/6 before I stopped bothering. I took two days off to go over to my friend's place to watch it played and I'm still undecided if it was a waste of time or not.

The good

Its very pretty. It looked pretty sexy on the big ass plasma (or whatever it is) TV my friend Mike has.

The "ok"

Combat is fairly simple. Switching between paradigms can be somewhat fun and strategic but usually isn't. A lot of the time you only have 2 party members and lots of the fights force you into a damage / healer duo. Healers don't do shit except heal so you'll often be fighting a needlessly long battle because you'll only be doing damage with 1 character. Looking back, I think Mike could have utilized the paradigm shifting a bit more to make fights quicker.

The music is fairly standard, perhaps a little too much on the electro-rock side of things for my tastes. It doesn't really stand out and is mostly forgettable. After 20 hours of recently watching FF13, I can't recall the battle music nor the wandering around the really long tunnel music like I can with just about every other Final Fantasy game.

The blah (or bad) And remember, my opinion here.

Really long tunnel. Really really really long tunnel. Thats all this is. There are no towns. There is no talking to random people, no exploring the world. You run down a tunnel, you fight some stuff, you get into a cut scene and then you do it some more. This started with FFX but at least towards the end of the game you got a bit of freedom to go around and explore a bit. And hey, who doesn't love Blitzball Crisis Core for the PSP was worse but there were a few areas you could still "explore" This is all personal preference of course but thats the kind of thing that made Final Fantasy to me.

The characters are totally unlikeable. Seriously, I can only tolerate Sazh. The rest are too whiney or too angry or too bubbly. I want Hope to fall off the side of a cliff and catch his eyelid on one of the many many MANY crystalline spiked protrusions. I'm not an advocate of hitting women but I want to punch Lightning in the neck. Vanille has me thinking I should be going to prison for staring a bit too long at her.

Not only that but they split your party up and combine them for no reason or stupid reasons. Lightning's reasons are basically she's angry and hates everyone so she wants to go off on her own. I think her and Hope are on the path to become Sith lords or something. (A sith named Hope, tee hee). Sazh and Vanille seem to be following people around cause they got nothing else better to do. Final Fantasy has never really been too original for bringing party members together but damn. Its almost as bad as the cliche D&D "You are all in a bar and...."

The story is confusing and/or incomplete feeling. A lot of it you unlock into the little datalog thing you can read and that feels kinda retarded to me. I shouldn't have to go into the menu and read a bland wall of text just to get caught up on the missing parts of the story when the characters should be acting it out, you know? I remember saying to Damon that I had to go and read up a bit on the story on Wikipedia before it started to make any sense. He said it made sense to him from the get go so I'm not sure where I went wrong.

The game doesn't feel like Final Fantasy at all I wouldn't say its a horrible game but its Final Fantasy in name only.

~Opinions from a hater that doesn't like to have fun~

I read a lot of the same negative things you wrote about on other reviews too but the differing opinions seem to be split among those who like open RPGs and those who like linear RPGs.

This was discussed in the article I linked some time ago about the psychology of eastern vs western gamers. To summarize it, western gamers like to feel like they have some choice whether that choice is real or illusory. Eastern gamers need to be given a solid goal to work toward or they will do absolutely nothing at all. (doesn't have to be a freakin straight line, just some sort of set goal like wander the forest until level 999 before the bridge is open to next town or whatever).

In the case of FF13, it seems sqeenix has decided to take the game to the extreme of eastern linearity (I should note that there is a minority of commentators of eastern origin that seem to tire of this linearity after having played other RPGs). And from your description, it might be the unholy confluence of Japanese gaming stereotypes in one game that makes it more glaringly obvious.

I personally don't have any interest or stake in the FF series. I finished 2 and 3 (which I enjoyed) and played part of 7 (and was bored and decided this style was not for me). I'm now merely a casual observer of the series at this point, interested only in it's evolution and to observe the cultural biases/implications/social psychologies.

So let's hear the pros of the game, people....

Just to let you know because I'm on like chapter 13 or something...

The beginning of the game is extremely linear and yes, you have two people and the fighting is very tedious and simple. It seems like all of that was sort of a primer to get you ready for the open-ended part of the game, which is where I am.

Around the time you get your jobs fleshed out in level 3 the game opens up and dumps you into a much larger world with side-quests, exploration, and choice. Characters gain access to all jobs instead of being funneled into certain ones and you can choose how you play them. You use parties of three, which you choose, and you choose who is the leader of that party. You set up your own paradigms, or you can have them randomly generated, but you do best to choose your own and plan ahead to switch between them for boss fights or whatever.

I like the story a lot, although I hate the character Snow. I want to just shoot him in the face with my level 22 Edged Carbine.

All that aside, it's a final fantasy game so you pretty much expect the storyline to be linear. The combat system is a combination between the dress-spheres of FFX-2 (except that changing jobs doesn't eat up a turn) and the gambit system of FFXII (although, instead of gambits you use paradigms and if you use libra on a target they intelligently choose to cast to the weakness). The levelling system reminds me of FFXII a lot, basically almost a carbon copy. Upgrading weapons is pretty cool, except it seems like every time I get something to level 10 I find a shiny new weapon that I wish I'd had from the beginning.

So I dunno, I love the game, and like Sord said, it is incredibly beautiful. Doesn't mean you'll like it, I mean tons of people love Modern Warfare and I hate it.

Thats good to hear that it does eventually get better but bleh I dunno if I can take the beginning slog much more. I'm sure I'll come back after he's played through 3 more chapters and it will be a bit better. He can go through all the torture for me

I'm only 3 hours in and am so going to hold off on impressions. HOWEVER based on my experiences so far Penny-arcade.com TOTALLY nailed their joke today.

I took a break from FF13 to finish Yakuza 3, but I got about as far as Sord did, and plan on picking the game back up, probably tonight (if I don't just go to bed instead)...

My quick and dirty thoughts.

Good:
Combat. Combat is actually really fun for me. Having 2 guys is not that big a deal to me, although at points WHICH 2 were available (and what jobs they had) definitely made a huge difference. I actually loved the stuff early on when I had Snow with the Sentinel job, looking forward to someone else getting that (or getting Snow back).

Maybe I'm being way more active than everyone else, but I Paradigm shift constantly. For enemies that really need to be staggered, I'll do an attack or two with Commando/Ravager, (since Commando hits slow the Chain bar's decay rate) switch to Ravager/Ravager to push it to a Break quicker, then back to a Commando/Ravager combo to lay the damage on. Toss in having to heal once in awhile (which I only do just enough to get filled back up, then switch out of) and the combat feels far more active to me.

I will admit though, that the 'trash' encounters can be too easy to really feel worth the time. I love me my JRPG's at times, but the Random battle sure needs to go. I like that you can skip, but it's an archaic game design that doesn't fit the game too well.

Oh I *love* that you heal to full after every fight. That's why I wish the fights were a little harder... the challenge can come from the fights (forcing you to use strategy with Shifts) instead of attrition / resource management.

World.
The world is amazing. Not just graphically, but I love the myth and lore that seems to exist in the world, and this is one of the things that drives me forward. I'm looking forward to seeing what the connection (or heck, even what they are) the Fal'cie have with humans. I'm looking forward to finding out more about the way this world works and seeing more of it.

Art Design.
Top Notch. Seriously, one of the best designed games in the franchise artistically. I'm not just talking the quality of the graphics either, their design just is incredibly appealing to me.

Ok/Meh/Bad.
Characters.
I don't hate the characters as much as 'hateboner' Sord, but they ARE some fairly weak characters comparatively to other FF games. Lightning is FINALLY starting to open up past her "I'm a mean bitch soldier who is angry all the time" phase and becoming somewhat likeable. This is like 6 - 7 hours in to the game. Your "main" character, the soul of your story, shouldn't be an unlikeable bitch for that long. She should have opened up way earlier.

Hope is also annoying, but now that he's growing a sack doesn't bother me as much. In the beginning when he's just a whiney emo pussy and Vanille keeps spouting generic japanese forms of encouragement (you have to hold on and tell him how you feel...) is tres badifique.

Vanille is... just too annoying. I'm usually a huge fan of the bubbly cute japanese stereotype, I loved Yuffie and Selphie in past games. But she's just way too over the top. TOO much optimism in the face of adversity, without ever actually ADDING anything. She's hot, she's cute, she's annoying as hell. I guess I'd tape her mouth shut before fun time. :O

Sazh is one of the coolest characters. He's kinda like FF's Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon. He even says "I'm getting to old for this crap" or something at some point.

Tutorial phase.
Game took too damn long to start proper. The combat took too long to open up and it took way too long to find out what all the damn items I was picking up were for (I had sold most of them, not knowing that they were going to be used to level up my weapons. Eff me! In general the game isn't THAT hard to figure out, there was no reason to drip feed the combat at the pace they did.

Story.
This is more of a meh. So far the story hasn't done much to excite me, it's more just been the actual world that's made me want to push forward. The characters seem to not give a shit about their whole focus / l'cie thing which makes me have issues mustering up interest in what their focus is. It would be nice to see them actually give some shit about what they are supposed to do, instead of Lightning just taking over the story with "I know, I'm gonna go attack the seat of power single handedly... yea that sounds good!" shit.

In short: 7-8 hours in, the game is fun and I look forward to continuing it. But aside from the fantastic world and combat system (and graphics obviously) I'm ranking it below some of the better FF games.

/edit/ OH. And on the subject of the PA comic, and how 'hard everything is to follow' I guess because the world is so interesting, I've spent time actually reading the Datalog entries, eager to find out more about the mythos/lore. So all that 'it's so hard to figure out what / who everything is' complaint I've seen a lot doesn't affect me. I was the same with Dragon's Age. The world / mythos was good enough that I actually would READ all that background information in the beginning, interested in finding more about the world.

I didn't know what the FUCK was going on with the game until I read through the datalog. In Dragon Age I read the stuff because I wanted to. you didn't need to read the things you unlocked to understand who the grey wardens were, what an arch-demon is, and the fact that you need to unite an army to kill it. It's sort of... understood.

In contrast, FFXII throws an awful lot of similar sounding words at you and expects you to know what they are. I finally sat down for 20 minutes and read each and every journal entry and now have a full understanding of what's going on. I'm just not toally sure that should be necessary.


As to Vah-neel... vanille whatever, you have to admire how they put a tatto on the upper thigh of a 15 year old in a Japanese game. Also, I want to cut and paste what my friend on the HDF forums had to say about this game, I think it's pretty good summary.

Sure, I can agree that the reading shouldn't be required. It didn't bother me though, and in the end wasn't THAT much text. The datalog only updates with info on things you've just encountered, so it's not like you have a whole ton of stuff to read early on.

I do find it strange that, while they dole out game systems at a snails pace, the world has very little exposition early on... it's like they expect you to know the world before you've gone to it.

BTW, LIGHTNING is the main character right? not snow? That is a bit confusing in the first few hours. Or is it sort of a joint story? With the other FF's it was a bit more understood. Tidus for X, Yuna for X-2, Van for XII, Cloud for VII, I guess Squall for VIII? Whatever, done with work, gonna go home and play Heavy Rain before going back to FFXIII since Heavy Rain is Gamefly and I own FFXIII.

The line between "Main" and "Partners" have become incredibly blurred in recent history, but yes... Lightning is supposed to be the hero/soul of the story.

And man. Final Fantasy has had some retarded heroes! It seems like the supporting cast is usually more likeable.

It sounds like it strips out all the stuff I hate about JRPGs, so I am totally sold. Plus I love the fact that when you die in combat you just respawn close to where you died, and after every battle you heal.

*Wall of text crits you, you die*

Um yea too much to read. I haven't started yet cause I knew awakening was coming out tomorrow. I didn't want to play for a week, then drop it for the month or two or three it takes me to beat Awakening before going back to it. I skimmed through the posts hope its not as negative as I'm seeing.

For the record though, I prefer the linear storyline. I hate sidequests, and I hate when you have to do them cause if you don't you won't have the gear to progress without the game getting really hard. That being said, the side quests in Dragon Age weren't so sideish. Most of the quests I grabbed I could do, doing the main quest line, so not so bad.

I also have not played a FF game to completion since 9, I played 10 or 10.2 until I got to the water polo game thingy, and I was pissed that it wouldn't let me win it, and I stopped playing. For realz if it isn't able to be beaten, just make it a cut scene! I'm hoping this one will be worth it.

Please squaresoft remake FF7 exactly as it was but with better graphics, droolies.

Well the wall of text is mostly good. At least for the readers of this board. Outside the opinions seem really really polarized.

You're gonna get Awakenings? I think I'm going to wait since its like 40 bucks! Ive never seen an expansion worth 40 bucks.

Slap my ass and call me Asian, I like linear storylines. I'm a simple guy, with simple pleasures, and I play RPGs for 1 reason, to kill shit. Any RPG that makes me jump through hoops just to get to the next combat sequence won't see much play time. All side quests and open exploration mean to me is more time looking up quests on a website so I know where to go to finish them quicker.

But yeah the biggest flaw of the story is that I've been playing for like ~2 hrs, and have no idea who the protagonist is. Not having someone to guide you through the story is pretty lame, did George Lucas write this shit?

@ Nira: square claims that remaking FF7 in 3D would cost too much money due to the sheer amount of detail to all the levels, particularly the cities, cop out? sounds like it to me!

I think the problem with remaking FF7 is easily the cost vs. the potential return. Two things work against it:

It can't be done on the DS
The FF games going to the DS have been great because of the level of graphics said game could possibly support. It allows them to keep their required resources down on the game, which keeps cost down. Remakes almost always make less money than new releases, so keeping your cost down is usually instrumental in a remakes cost effectiveness. Also note that a lot of the square remakes are games most 'modern' gamers never experienced. Even FF6 happened before the big mass market gaming boom, so many FF7 fans potentially *never* played it. That alone makes these far more viable for remakes than games from the PS era and beyond.

Advent Children set the bar high
Plain and simple, people wouldn't be happy unless the fidelity of the game was at least close to the Advent Children crap. So in the end they'd have to sink some pretty hefty resources in to the game in order to make it look acceptable as a remake to the gaming community. As such I can't imagine a game that offered minor graphical upgrades would sell very well (especially not when the original is available on PSN is 10 bucks AND playable on PSP or PS3).

In short... to make a PSone game as well loved as FF7 attractive as a remake, it would require some serious funds to make the game. Length, complexity, and level of graphics would all have to be pretty high. And as much as you may not think so, a 60 dollar graphical upgrade to a game that would feel archaic would end up selling like crap.

I doubt it wouldn't sell. People still buy FF7 on PSP/PS1 classics on a regular basis. I'm sure an FF7 remake (with minor gameplay modifications to make it feel less ancient) would probably sell millions and millions. Then they could use the engine for FF15

They should just outsource it to some other random company like Mistwalker

You won't even have to look up the side quests. >_>

When you get to the open ended portion (which you can totally skip and continue on with the story, all you miss out on is a ton of cp, which is basically exp) your map will show you where the quest starts are. Then, when you pick up a quest there will be a star on your map to show you where your mark is. Easy peasy.

The farther you get in the story, it seems like all of the characters are the heroes. It's basically a story of how all their lives are intertwined by and for the Fal'Cie. Not really a main character, per se, but rather 6 main characters. Each has their own story and summon and all that great stuff.

Yea they do buy FF7 on a regular basis... for 9.99.

that's pretty good for a 12 year old game or however old it is, especially when the other classic games run for 5 bucks

If he's using a healer in every paradigm, he's doing it wrong. Rarely should you ever need to switch to a Medic, as you'll want to be with Commando/Ravagers the majority of the time. Even when you do switch to a Medic, it's just to get 1 Cure or Curea off, then swap right back into your attack mode. Any fight that requires constant healing, the damage usually comes off too quickly for the Medic to heal, and you're better off popping potions. Combat is %100 about building chains, and you can't do that without at least 1 Commando and 1 Ravager up at all times, and a Commando in the group as a minimum.

The combat system, overall, is pretty unique, I think. I can't remember ever playing in an RPG where I could give two shits about what abilities I'm using. Being liberal with Libra and just doing auto-chains will be fine for 99% of the time, at least as far as I've gotten. Being in the right Paradigm and timing your switches at the right time is way more important than your actual abilities. If you can't build chains and don't have the right paradigm up at the right time, then combat is going to be pretty painful and tedious. So far, the only semi-hard fight I've seen is Odin, and he was only hard until I found the right paradigm.

Kiawah is 100% correct. Especially when you're fighting as two people which seems to be a pretty constant thing around the part of the game I'm at. I think the paradigm I start with is called Smart Bomb which which is a ravager and a Sabateur. Then I switch to Duel Ravager once the enemy is sufficiently debuffed and use War and Peace if I need to heal. If I have access to commando to keep the chain going I'll try and do Commando/Ravager but sometimes that isn't handy. I'm still early in the game though, maybe 10 hours.

I never have much luck with dual ravenger combos. You've gotta keep a commando in your party, or the chain gauge drops too quickly. Not being able to build chains is what makes fights 2-3 stars instead of 5 stars, and you just can't do that with dual ravenger's.

There's a little stretch of the game, around chapters 3-4 I think, where Lightning isn't in your party, and Sazh hasn't learned how to be a commando yet, and you're forced into dual ravenger combos. This is pretty painful, as it makes it near impossible to build chains. But it gets better around chapter 5, when Sazh learns commando, and you can always have one in your party. Even though Sazh is a natural ravenger, it's more important to have him as a commando and building chain gauges, than it is letting him play his natural spec.

Don't be thrifty on potions, either. They're more important than medics in tough fights. Potions are instant heals and they don't stop your ATB gauge. Honestly, the only time I switch to a medic is during a low burst phase, when I just want to top someone off. Any other time, I'm chugging a potion and staying in commando/ravenger mode.

Man once you get three in your party it's easy.

I start out Com-Rav-Syn (using Sazh as Synergist for haste, bravery, and faith because those are way better than Hope's crappy spells), then Com-Rav-Rav until stuff's dead. If it's a boss fight or something I'll go Com-Med-Rav to heal up occasionally, but I wait til people get pretty low before healing them up.

I recommend maxing out jobs that you don't use on characters as well just for the extra hp, strength, and magic. It goes a long way.

Also, I got all of my weapons to star level, but I can't use any of the catalysts? Anyone else to that point yet? Do I just need to progress the story farther in order to use them or what?